Intuitive Medicine Summit Survey Bonus
Indigenous Spirit-Inspired Medicine
Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona shares that traditional indigenous elders cultivate relationships with spirits who guide them in their healing practices. The instructions they receive for individual people rise to the level of a kind of precision medicine in its recommendations: applying only to that person for that period of time. This runs counter to the demands of conventional medicine, in which any treatment applies to all people at all times.
In This Session:
- Traditional indigenous elders cultivate relationships with beings in the spiritual realm who guide their healing practices
- Conventional medicine rejects these ideas for it expects any treatment to apply to a particular disease all the time and not a particular person at one particular time
- Spirit-guided medicine is an indigenous kind of intuitive medicine
Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona is of Native American heritage. He studied medicine at Stanford University, and completed post-graduate training programs in family medicine and psychiatry at The University of Vermont. In his book, Coyote Medicine, he describes how he began to interact with elders while still in medical school, to better understand self-healing.
Lewis works for Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness, which serves the Five Tribes of Maine, as their medical director. He is also the director of the Coyote Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing the wisdom of Indigenous cultures into contemporary health care. He is also a clinical associate professor of family medicine at the University of New England and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont.
He's written several other books, including Coyote Healing, Coyote Wisdom, Narrative Medicine, Healing the Mind Through the Power of Story: the Promise of Narrative Psychiatry, and his latest, co-authored with Barbara Mainguy, Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation Through Story.
